Top Reasons Why Scientists Should Use Mac OS X Leopard
The hundreds of innovations packed into Leopard make it the most powerful Mac operating system Apple has ever shipped. If you work in science, you’ll find that Leopard puts exciting new capabilities in your hands. Below we present some of Leopard’s most useful features for science.
Check Out Files without Opening Them.
Quick Look lets you view the contents of files – research papers, proposals, technical publications – without launching their applications – a major timesaver. One click lets you leaf through a multipage report, view a simulation video, or check out a Keynote conference presentation. Click again, and you can view the file full-screen.
Never Lose a File Again.
Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac to an external hard drive or Mac OS X server so you can easily restore anything you need. Has the draft of a jointly-authored paper or a grant application gone missing? Using Time Machine’s intuitive visual display, you can quickly browse into the past and see exactly what your computer looked like at any point in time. With a single click, you can restore a file or a folder, or restore your entire computer to the way it was at the time you select.
Take Visual Collaboration to a New Level.
Leopard’s upgraded iChat lets you share your desktop with a colleague, working together in real time with live video feeds of each other. You can do away with iterative emailed drafts of papers and reports and arrive at consensus quickly. Drop an application into iChat Theater, and both of you can view and manipulate full-screen scientific images and graphics – and watch each other’s response. iChat can also record your meetings for reference or sharing.
Stop Running Out of Screen Space.
Spaces lets you organize and unclutter your desktop workspace when you’re working on multiple projects. Create a space for your productivity apps and a separate one for that grant proposal or research paper you’re working on. Add another space for your analysis on that new experimental data that just came in. Anytime you click on the space, everything you need – and none of the clutter you don’t need – will be there. Create as many spaces as you like, and move from one space to another with a single click.
Get the Most from Multicore Macs.
Leopard comes with new development tools that let you take full advantage of the Mac’s compute muscle. Powerful new NSOperation Cocoa APIs help you optimize scientific applications for multicore processing. Xcode 3, with full 64-bit support, includes Xray, a visual tool for optimizing application performance. Leopard’s scheduler efficiently allocates tasks across cores and processors to let you see the results of your studies more quickly.
Load and Access Big Data.
With Leopard’s 64-bit power, your science applications can address up to 4TB of physical memory. You can now view and access very large data sets –such as medical DICOM stacks, massive engineering models, and seismic or astronomical studies – without resorting to disk I/O.
Run 32-bit and 64-bit Science Applications Side by Side.
You have 32-bit apps? Just load them in. They run natively alongside your 64-bit applications. Leopard seamlessly supports them both.
Work with Fully Compliant BSD UNIX on the Mac.
If you’ve invested in the development of your own UNIX-based scientific applications, you’ll be glad to know that the fully compliant UNIX technology in Leopard runs any POSIX-compliant source code. It can compile and run your existing UNIX code. And it provides a multitude of new features that simplify the lives of developers of scientific applications, including a new tab-interfaced Terminal.
Give Your Research Project Team its Own Wiki Server.
Leopard Server makes it easy to set up wiki-powered, limited-access internal websites with calendars, blogs, and mailing lists. Set up wikis for your research team and projects; users can edit pages, add comments or references, upload files and scientific images, track research documents revisions, and post schedules. Wiki Server keeps your science team on the same page.
Share Your Work with High-Quality Podcasts.
With Leopard Server’s Podcast Capture, you easily share your research and your insight by capturing content from digital video cameras, USB mikes, or iSight cameras. Podcast producer leverages the power of QuickTime to encode content and also accepts and re-encodes media from other popular formats such as Windows Media, Flash 8, and more. Simply add a title and a description to your research project, add any custom visual touches you like, and let your recording automatically upload to Podcast Producer, which encodes and publishes it for playback to blogs, iTunes, iTunes U, or even to cell phones.
Share Files with Macs and PCs. And Be More Efficient.
Leopard Server gives you a way to share files – research project status reports, for example – in a shared central folder, so all team members can access the same current file whether they’re working on Macs or PCs. No confusion about document versions; no concern about data going missing. The file is safe on the server. And Leopard transfers files up to twice as fast as Tiger.
Build A Computational Cluster for Science Applications with Xgrid.
Build a grid and harvest unused compute cycles from desktops, laptops, and servers with Xgrid, which is built into Leopard and Leopard Server. Choose one system as controller, then add Xgrid agents. Bonjour makes configuration instantaneous. Xgrid Admin gives you full control over all jobs; Scoreboard intelligently prioritizes and assigns jobs for greatest efficiency. And you can bring remote systems into the grid over the Internet.